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Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

I have a little bit of a vice of enjoying some "idle" games. I have intended to do some very basic manual screen carving & ocr & computer vision to try to "read" my state in these games, & have multi-actor "play" models for them, just for fun really & to decrease time sunk gaming (by spending significant time coding/learning).

This certainly seems like it has a lot of promise to make that much much much easier. Game UI's are less uniform so maybe this might be harder or not easily be applicable, but hopefully

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As someone who has done this to many games over a few decades, I can definitively say: 100% of the time, it ruins the fun of the game.

I can't say exactly why. Maybe you feel like you haven't earned it. Maybe it's the idle nature of farming that we really enjoy...

Depends what you consider fun, and how far you take it. Some people enjoy programming more than repetitive clicking in a GUI. For a clicker game, writing a bot lets you iterate on strategies easier - is it faster to get to level 2 if I buy the upgrade for A or B first? For Trackmania, it lets you get a world record and a YouTube video with 14M views.

https://youtu.be/Dw3BZ6O_8LY

Yeah. I appreciate the warning & enjoy the personal tail, but it's just that guys story & it's being projected as an absolute.

If I don't enjoy the experience anymore that's fine with me too. I think I'd still feel a sense of accomplishment, feel like I'd advanced as a human and mastered my environment and machines for diving in here.

I don't feel the agency I want to have. These games make me want to extend myself, my agency. Playing them manually offers some very low grade enjoyment but that sense of missing out gnaws at me, and I'm not at all dissuaded by parent trying to ward me off, and if I do end up winning so hard I don't care anymore, me right now would regard that as a victory condition & rief from this pressure I feel about ineffectively plodding through as I do now.

You might want to look at Serpent AI: granted the repo is now in an archived state, but it did similar things to those you mention.

https://github.com/SerpentAI/SerpentAI

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